Fiona Duncan is a Canadian-American writer based between New York and Los Angeles. She is the author Exquisite Mariposa (Soft Skull Press, 2019) and Ex-Best Friends (F. Publications, 2025) and the co-editor of Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me (Bierke Books, 2023). Duncan is a member of the late Pippa Garner's estate and the founder of Hard to Read, a literary social practice.
Essay 
I Am Abandoned by Fiona Duncan
In 1976, Barbara T. Smith was invited to participate in a group exhibition at Caltech's Baxter Art Gallery. Her performance involved staging two proto chatbots—a Rogerian therapist program called DOCTOR, and PARRY, a program that mimicked the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia—against a live recreation of Goya’s Maja paintings. Smith eventually entered the chat, attempting to seduce one of the bots, before Caltech’s gallery director shut it all down. Writer Fiona Duncan traces Smith's engagement with performance, technology, intimacy, and sexuality, reflecting on the tangled nature of contemporary digital life and how the work speaks precisely to our time nearly 50 years later.